JOURNAL OF THE INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR SHELL AND SPATIAL STRUCTURES: J.

IASS

HEINZ ISLER: FROM DELFT TO PRINCETON AND BEYOND

DAVID P. BILLINGTON
Gordon Y.S. Wu Professor of Engineering Emeritus, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA; billington@princeton.edu Editors Note: Manuscript received 17 April 2011; accepted 27 July 2011. This paper is open for written discussion, which should be submitted to the IASS Secretariat no later than March 2012.

ABSTRACT In his works and thought, Heinz Isler (1926-2009) articulated a vision of engineering in concrete thin shells that challenges professional assumptions, not only of what is possible in shell design, but of what it means to be an engineer. Isler's insistence that structures be elegant as well as efficient and economical attacked the notions that structural design was mere technical work and that beautiful works were of necessity architecture. He challenged engineering educators to encourage aesthetic imagination in engineers within the strict disciplines of economy and practicality. Keywords: Heinz Isler, concrete shell roofs, structural art, thin shells

1. FROM DELFT TO PRINCETON I first met Heinz Isler in the Netherlands in 1961 at a conference on thin shell concrete structures for which he gave a presentation entirely different from any other speaker. It was far removed from the mathematical and experimental works of the other engineers, but his means of illustration were lively and engaging. I introduced myself afterwards and we sat together at meals and traveled together to see the huge Dutch Delta Works. His sparkling personality made an impression on me, but I did not fully grasp the essence of his designs. At that time I was beginning my academic career and writing a book on thin shell concrete structures following the ideas and analyses presented by nearly all of the other speakers at the conference. Such work required considerable effort as I sought to transform myself from an engineer of design to one of research. This meant that I began to write and teach thin shells from a classical (mathematical) perspective. I thought little about Isler's unusual presentation. The peer group was not receptive to off-beat ideas and I quickly learned acceptable projects so that, thanks to a kind administrator, I began to receive grants from the National Science Foundation with my colleague Robert Mark. We wrote papers, worked with graduate students, and I completed a book on thin shells in 1965 [1]. Over the next 17 years, we gained experience and attended many conferences.

Then in 1978 Mark and I went to a conference of the International Association for Shell Structures in Morgantown, West Virginia. There I heard a truly spectacular lecture by a Swiss engineer whom I did not immediately recognize. It was Heinz Isler. Suddenly I understood his message and realized the genius of his work and ideas. I also met his dear wife Maria. Right away I invited them to Princeton where we had just mounted in the Princeton University Art Museum an exhibition devoted to the bridges of Christian Menn, also a Swiss, and a good friend of Isler's. When he came I suggested to him that we organize an exhibition of his work next, and he agreed. This began a close friendship and a completely new experience for me in structural engineering.

Figure 1: Heinz Isler lecturing at a blackboard (this instance at the founding IASS congress in Madrid, 1959)

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The following spring he returned to Princeton to discuss the exhibition and to give a splendid lecture. That summer of 1979, my wife and I were in Switzerland for a conference and for a continuation of my research on the Swiss engineer Robert Maillart (1872-1940). Because I had now become fascinated by Isler's thin shells, I visited his office and he kindly escorted me to see many of his finest shells. I had been teaching a course since 1974 on structures as an art form and now I could greatly enrich that course by lecturing on Isler's shells. The Princeton University Art Museum mounted the exhibition, "Heinz Isler as Structural Artist," in the spring of 1980 [2]. He came and gave a hugely successful lecture to open the show, Figure 1. Meanwhile I was revising my 1965 thin shell book and now I realized that I needed to put in it something to emphasize the significance of Isler's major innovations. The revised book appeared in 1982 with Isler's Sicli building on the cover and a chapter mainly dealing with his ideas [3]. The following year I put the course on structural art into a book with a full chapter on Isler and then I arranged for him to come to Princeton to lead a two-week seminar with students in my concrete course. This was a seminal experience which led to great student excitement and a series of senior and graduate student theses on Isler's work. The 1980 exhibition travelled throughout the United States and even went to Japan so that when I lectured at other schools there was now interest in Isler's ideas and works. I continued to visit Switzerland every summer, primarily to complete a biography of Robert Maillart, and during each visit I would spend time with Heinz and Maria Isler. Then in 1991, at the time of the 700th anniversary of the founding of the Swiss Confederation (1291), we came to celebrate the naming of Maillart's 1930 Salginatobel Bridge as an International Historic Civil Engineering Landmark. My daughter Sarah was at this time a student at the ETH (Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule, Federal Technical School) in Zurich on a Fulbright Fellowship, and my wife and I came with the former chairman of our Civil Engineering Department at Princeton, Norman Sollenberger and his wife Martha, and our close colleague J. Wayman Williams and his wife. During our trip we visited Isler's laboratory and saw some of his structures.

All during these years, Isler kept telling me about his teacher at the ETH, Pierre Lardy (1903-1958), who while teaching structural analysis and structural concrete from a rigorous mechanics perspective also stressed aesthetic ideas. I had also heard about Professor Lardy from Christian Menn. Earlier in my research on Maillart, I had found that another professor at the ETH, Wilhelm Ritter (1847-1906), had been an influence on Maillart's generation. Early in this century, I had met Preston Haskell, a distinguished designer-builder and graduate of our department, and he introduced me to Susan Taylor, the new director of the Princeton Art Museum, to whom I suggested an exhibition on the four great Swiss engineers (Robert Maillart, Othmar Ammann, Christian Menn, and Heinz Isler) along with their most influential teachers (Ritter for Maillart and Ammann, Lardy for Menn and Isler). In 2002 Heinz and Maria returned to Princeton where he gave another stellar lecture and we discussed in detail the new exhibition. Then during that summer we organized a team of students with two master laboratory specialists who together created eight models for the exhibition. The single most important feature of the project turned out to be the eight notebooks of Heinz Isler, who recorded with clear writing and elegant drawings the lectures of Pierre Lardy from 1947 to 1950. These became the most significant intellectual part of the project and the book written for it, The Art of Structural Design: A Swiss Legacy, drew heavily on these original works [4]. My close contact with Isler and with Christian Menn had already had a major influence on my teaching and on my writing. The exhibition opened on March 8, 2003, and from September 2004 to December 2006 it travelled to MIT, Kansas City, Zurich, Toronto, Grinnell, and finally to Smith College. It drew large audiences everywhere and exceeded all other exhibitions mounted by the Princeton University Art Museum in the number of places travelled. It did present me with two problems: first, to keep publicists from calling the four designers architects, and second, to overcome their tendency to call the show Bridges. In my writings and in my lectures at each place where the exhibitions opened, I was able to stress the error in each designation and thus single out the revolutionary ideas and works embodied in the buildings of Heinz Isler.

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2. PRINCETON AND BEYOND I After meeting Isler in 1978 in Morgantown, I proceeded to encourage him not only to visit Princeton but to see the exhibition we had made of the bridges of Christian Menn and to consider having us create an exhibit of his thin shell designs. Isler had deeply impressed others at the West Virginia meeting so that I began with colleagues at other universities to plan a lecture tour for him throughout the United States. The plan led to developing a tour after Princeton to Cornell, Berkeley, and Los Angeles. At Princeton, Isler gave two major presentations one to architecture students and the other to civil engineering students. These differed from his Morgantown one and gave me my first insight into his thinking. He began with an introduction describing briefly the works of Nervi, Esquillan, Torroja, and Candela. Then he mentioned a few works in the United States. All of these he defined as geometrical shapes, by which he meant those derived from mathematical formulas. He then described non-geometrical shapes, which he would later define as structural shapes, or ones that are statically rather than mathematically correct. These non-geometric shapes provide, as he stated, a really limitless number of possibilities.... For the main part of his lectures, he illustrated such shapes with a great many examples of his completed thin shells [5]. He then returned to his opening observation of the wide variety of thin shells in nature and the rare appearance of non-geometric shells in the built environment. He proceeded to explain why so little has been done in this promising potential for structures so thin and yet so strong. His answer came at the end of his talk: In my opinion the only explanation lies in our education. We are not trained to deal with non-linear forms. Our training has its emphasis on abstract and mathematical thinking. We all come out of the schools of the great mathematicians! He ended his lecture strongly: The genuine sense for natural shapes and forms lies bare, is undeveloped and even suppressed. His talks were impressive, his personality engaging, and above all his structures seem to approach perfection. But the answer he gave me verbally not in his published papers now seems at odds

with his lectures and writings. In his article, written for the catalogue of our 1980 exhibition, Heinz Isler as Structural Artist, he avoided the critique of education and answered his rhetorical question: How actually do I do the shaping? He proceeded to respond: I will lift the veil on a little secret.... He then provided me with a set of slides showing the simple process of covering a hanging membrane with wet plaster which after hardening is overturned to create a shape in pure compression (Figure 2 with a typical realization shown in Figure 3). Although this was his method, he quickly added a list of careful studies required afterwards to create a full-scale shell structure that would perform well over time. So it was that after 1980 Isler began to visit Princeton more frequently, and my wife and I and often my children began to see Heinz and Maria Isler in Switzerland. During this time between 1980 and 2002, we all became closer friends but we did not progress in learning the ideas more deeply until the planning for our next exhibition scheduled for 2003. The intervening time held many events but only after I had completed my major work on Maillart (published in 1997) did I turn once again to thin shells. 3. PRINCETON AND BEYOND II Back in 1979, Swiss engineers began collecting materials in the United States for a centennial celebration on Othmar Ammann (1879-1965), the designer of the great New York City bridges from the George Washington (1931) to the Verrazano Narrows (1964). I was invited to prepare a paper that led me to Ammann's education at the ETH in Zurich under Wilhelm Ritter. Ritter had also educated Robert Maillart, and this led me to title my presentation of 1979 and publication in 1980 Wilhelm Ritter, Teacher of Maillart and Ammann. It was after having studied the writings and teachings of Ritter that I recognized in the late 1990s the importance as well of Professor Pierre Lardy, who was the teacher of Isler and Menn. In both cases a great teacher had educated the two greatest structural engineers of their periods, so I began to think of the relationships between education and practice once again. Lardy's early teaching made continued reference to the aesthetics of structure, not as an isolated topic

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Figure 2: Hanging membrane models

Figure 3: Badi Brugg shell, 1981

but as one integral to the engineer's design. In Isler's lecture notes there is no mention of collaboration with architects but rather, within engineering, the integration of structural performance and visual choices. Moreover, the lectures regularly included sketches of various structural systems and details he would then analyze mathematically, often with comments on their appearance. Lardy's teaching, therefore, centered on a strong mathematical treatment of structures with emphases on simplified analytic methods, discussion of practice including aspects of economy, and continual reference to the aesthetics of form. Lardy's teaching about concrete structures differed radically from contemporaneous courses given on the same subject in the United States, a contrast that still exists. It is rare to find a complete set of lecture notes on technical courses, and it is almost without precedent

to discover notes that so intimately bond the technical and the aesthetic in engineering. Lardy's teaching has nothing to do with the philosophical study of aesthetics but rather with an artist's viewpoint on what most educators would call purely technical issues. Lardy, in these notes, reveals himself to be an artist in teaching and an art critic in practice. There is no evidence that Lardy's students thought he was diluting or subverting his technical teaching by including aesthetics. The evidence from Isler and Menn is strong in claiming a deep influence on gifted designers, an influence unique in engineering education and the product of an educational artist. Isler was impressed particularly by Lardy's chamber of horrors, a series of slides showing ugly structures. Following graduation, he accepted Lardy's offer of a position as assistant at the ETH, where from January 1951 until May 1953, he

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helped Lardy with teaching. He also worked on the many cases of structural failure that Lardy had been asked to explain. Lardy's direct influence on Isler was evident through the student notebooks. Deeper even than that mute testimony is the summary that Isler himself gave half a century after leaving Lardy's assistantship: He reminded us, the engineering students, a) that we have in us a sense for esthetics b) that we have the right to use it c) that we are allowed to mention our opinion d) and that we can find and express it in our projects This to my opinion was the invaluable, great, and unique contribution he gave to us. Not the statics, not the theories, not the investigations were his greatest and lasting influence but encouraging us to find and apply esthetics from within us. The four principles noted by Isler are almost never part of engineering education. Engineers and especially academics often argue that aesthetics are not part of their profession. If you want beauty, hire an architect or, more radically, a sculptor. This attitude does not reflect the reality that Lardy knew and that Isler expressed, a reality that includes an aesthetic sense within all of us. But it can be suppressed, avoided, even ridiculed. One major objective of education in engineering should be to encourage students to see, accept, and begin to use that elemental sense. That teaching, however, is only viable when practiced by someone like Lardy, whose disciplined mathematical training (a training that most engineering professors now have) provided the sole context within which the search for engineering aesthetics could flower. There are many educators who think that beautiful diagrams, elegant models, and free forms will stimulate engineering students to create beautiful works. This often leads to the view that elegance and economy of construction are opposing ideals. They are wrong. Beautiful structures only grow out of disciplined engineering. Lardy knew that, and Isler's shells expressed it. Lardy may appear to us in the early twenty-first century as a unique, inimitable character of another age and more specifically of another background. The legitimacy

of his teaching practical aesthetics rested on his serious mathematical background combined with some direct experience in traditional art. It has been overlooked that, fifty years later, surprisingly large numbers of engineering teachers have a similar background. Like Lardy, they are grounded in mathematics, and they have not come from sustained experience in practice. Some have deep avocational interests in painting, music, and literature. But it does not occur to them that they could infuse their technical teaching with the sense of aesthetics that Isler received from his professor. Evidence from Isler and his colleague Christian Menn support the imperative for such education in our time. This imperative requires that the case for engineering structure as art be made as clearly and as convincingly as possible. It can be made only through a study of structural artists. Therefore, it is essential in explaining Isler's work to recognize how it avoids needless complexity or mere novelty and rises to art. His major works follow the theme of finding and expressing aesthetics and in doing so in a way that avoids form-making pitfalls of computation and complication. 4. PRINCETON AND BEYOND III Isler credited his recognition of aesthetics to his teacher and he believed that no one followed his ideas and hence his constructions because of the way in which structural engineers are educated. There is no question in my mind that Isler correctly defined the problem but he did not give a solution, at least not publicly. Listening to his public lectures can be exhilarating as, for example, his pyrotechnic lecture in our large lecture hall just before the opening of the 1980 exhibition in the Princeton University Art Museum. The applause was loud and sustained, and the bubbling of conversation equally so from the lecture hall to the museum, where many spoke to me of the need for us in America to build such things and to teach our students to use their talents as did Heinz Isler. That sparkling event stimulated me to talk to Isler about the future, about getting his works built in our country, and about having him come to give a twoweek long seminar to our civil engineering students. The seminar took place to the joy of the students, and our talks with Isler continued, but no structures appeared in the United States. Over the two decades that followed, I kept in touch with Isler on

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trips to Switzerland and visits by him to Princeton, but not until the start of a new century did we come back closely together. My long-term colleague John Abel stimulated this reconnection by asking me to review the book by John Chilton, Heinz Isler, published in 2000 in a series called The Engineer's Contribution to Contemporary Architecture [6]. The series title does not describe Isler's work, even remotely. But Chilton's book correctly portrays Isler as a structural artist, as an engineer and not as an architect. Just before reading Chilton's book, I had begun the discussions in Princeton that led to our 2003 exhibition devoted to Swiss engineers. My studies of the three bridge engineers Maillart, Ammann, and Menn, already intensive, caused me to return to the study of thin shell concrete structures focused on Heinz Isler. When I began to draft chapters on Isler's work and on Lardy's influence for our exhibition book, our conversations became much richer even if at times sharply critical. Two key aspects, my interpretation of Isler's works and the model building for the museum exhibition by one of our graduate students, elicited responses from Isler that greatly deepened my understanding of his ideas. First, my interpretation of the works led Isler to describe in some detail his thinking. The two ideas he stressed were public lecturing and private education. Of his public lectures he believed that there must have been about one thousand of them. In addition to that astounding estimate, he gave many small classes or seminars, usually for engineering students, such as the two-week seminar on form-finding that he gave at Princeton in April 1983. The aim, as he put it, was to open minds and hands for creativity. The aim was not to prepare students to embark upon the design of Isler shells but to awaken in them the sense that such things were possible for civil engineers to create. Second, for the real education in shell design, Isler told me, that without an orderly build up course of education on my specific subject nobody is able to understand the essential problems in the domain of the new generation of shells which I had the unique opportunity to develop. He defined entering that domain as requiring him to ponder very carefully all thoughts, feelings, hesitations as well as expectations when I had to risk steps into new

land. In short, he stressed the long arduous effort of studying, thinking, and trying out new ideas. This was his discipline and it was essential to his ability to play with new forms. Our model building gave us some sense, if necessarily not the fullest sense, of the discipline involved. 5. CONCLUSION: THE POTENTIAL LEGACY OF HEINZ ISLER A quarter of a century of interaction with Heinz Isler deepened our understanding and fascination with his works at Princeton, and many of our students still carry his images in their minds. But the realization of actual structures such as he built still seems to be beyond us. Isler was correct to say that the fault lay with engineering education and its emphasis on mathematics and science as the fundamentals of engineering. Thus the very idea of design is left out or taught as a generic subject with fixed rules that can be taught academically. Design can only properly be taught beginning with studies of the best works of the greatest engineers and must explain how they were made both conceptually and practically. Isler was the designer of such works. He does not represent the end of thin shell concrete structures but rather a beginning. Isler was not a teacher by profession, yet he provides a basis for the scholarship essential to the teaching of structural engineering students in this century. If great works such as Isler's are to be built in the future, there will need to be a clear recognition of the enduring qualities in the great structural engineering designs of the last century that will never make them out of fashion. The Salginatobel Bridge, the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge, the Sunniberg Bridge, the thin shells of Nervi, Candela, and Isler are all a foundation for scholarship and teaching in the twenty-first century. How to teach these outstanding examples and gain acceptance for the study, not just of generic rules and best practices, but of actual best works, is our present challenge in the education of future engineers. When Heinz Isler gave his brief talk at the founding IASS conference in 1959 (Figure 1), he announced in general how that new education might begin. He was attacked by some of the leading structural engineers of that time Torroja, Esquillan, and Arup. But Isler's work, and the combination of his

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strong discipline, his heightened aesthetic, his urge to see many things built, and above all his sense of play within the discipline of structure, exemplify the kind of engineer that I believe will someday be the model in engineering education. His works, and those of other engineers who similarly valued simplicity, economy, and elegance, will inspire great engineering in this century as it did in the last. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Structures, Second Edition, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1982. [4] BILLINGTON, D.P., The Art of Structural Design: A Swiss Legacy, with contributions by DOIG, J. and others, Princeton University Art Museum/Yale University Press, 2003, 211 pp. See especially pp. 112-162. These recollections and those that follow are drawn from personal memory; from correspondence between Heinz Isler and David P. Billington, 1978-2003, Princeton Maillart Archive, Princeton University; and from BILLINGTON, D.P., and WILLIAMS, J.W., Heinz Isler and Princeton University, Princeton Maillart Archive, 2006, 55 pp. The Maillart Archive is held by the Princeton University Library. BILLINGTON, D.P., Book Review of Heinz Isler, (Book by CHILTON, J. Thomas Telford Ltd., London, 2000), Journal of the IASS, Vol. 43, No. 1, n. 138, April 2002, pp. 61-64.

[5] This paper could not have been written without the support and encouragement of John Abel, who has worked closely with me since 1970. David P. Billington, Jr., helped write and edit this paper. REFERENCES [1] [2] BILLINGTON, D.P., Thin Shell Concrete Structures, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1965. Heinz Isler as Structural Artist, Catalogue and Essays, Princeton University Art Museum, 1980, 47 pp. BILLINGTON, D.P., Thin Shell Concrete [6]

[3]

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